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Published on Thursday, May 15, 2008
By Ramona Shelburne
It sounds, at first, like the premise to a Philip Roth novel. A strange, alternate reality where one key event, one key decision goes another way and subsequent history, as we know it, is forever altered.
In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier. Every year, we celebrate the day and the man, wondering aloud how things could ever have transpired any differently.
But just three years earlier, Robinson found himself in a situation that could've changed everything.
While stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, in 1944, Robinson was arrested, then court-martialed, after he refused to move to the back of a bus. For nearly a month, his career and his reputation were in jeopardy.
It wasn't a situation anyone wanted to be in. Not Robinson, not the country and not the Army, which had celebrated his enlistment with great fanfare and was slowly trying to integrate during World War II
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